Chain of Events

by Fredrik T. Olsson

  The shockwave pushed the cameraman to the helicopter floor. He scrambled wildly for something to hold, handles and seats and whatever there was, and when he finally managed to stand upright again he realised there was Plexiglas above him and Plexiglas below him and the helicopter was flying on its side and that couldn’t be good.

  They had flipped over.

  The rotor blades continued to turn, cutting vertically through the air, making the helicopter spin sideways around its own axis, and across the seat backs he saw the pilot struggling with his controls, the world passing around them, around and around at terrifying speed, and then he saw the student building come towards them and then he shut his eyes.

  His last thought was that if the helicopter didn’t stop spinning they would crash right into the woman on the roof.

  If Leo hadn’t been so focused on the phone display he might have seen it in time.

  The helicopter hit the building, rotors first.

  It cut through the masonry taking everything with it.

  There was a chaos of smoke and flying debris and then it was all over and Leo knew he should be dead too but he wasn’t.

  He was standing alone on a rooftop.

  He tried to cling to the hope that what he had just seen hadn’t happened, that maybe there was an anomaly, an optical illusion that made it look one way on the screen, even though the reality was completely different.

  Leo lifted his eyes from his phone. He saw clouds of dust and debris and burning fuel, and the ledge where Christina had been standing. It was no longer a ledge but a hole.

  The solid concrete surface was gone. Instead of pipes and antennae and vents he could see straight ahead, straight down, a gaping cavity in the corner of the building as if someone had taken a bite out of it. And just where the bite had been taken was the spot where Christina had stood and talked to the world.

  The wind whipped at his clothes and noise thundered around him, but everything seemed remote, at a distance, all the sirens and engines and fire. And here he was in the middle of it all, nobody to see him, nobody who knew that he’d survived, but also nobody who wondered.

  He stood there. Didn’t move. Impossible to say for how long.

  Then, finally, he turned off the phone.

  As the picture from Leo’s camera disappeared from the screen in the large auditorium, just as it did from the screens on thousands of desks in Sweden and Scandinavia and probably countless other places, live footage continued to stream from other news networks on the surrounding screens.

  The building the helicopter had crashed into had lost a great chunk at one corner. Walls and windows were gone, all the way from the roof and on towards the ground, and where cut-off floors ended in the middle of the air, papers and textiles and building material floated slowly downwards, down towards the flaming wreckage of what had once been a helicopter.

  Reporters chattered over each other at the top of their voices, text tickers scrolled across screens, shouting in capitals, screaming that Slotervaart Hospital had been bombed by its own air force, or perhaps the jet had been hijacked and this was the work of terrorists. Everyone was guessing and it was chaos and hands against earphones and journalists panicky telling the world about things they didn’t know.

  Nobody saw the young man standing alone on the rooftop. Nobody mentioned the woman who’d been standing on the ledge that the helicopter hit.

  Only here, in the Parliament with the blue chairs, only here did everyone know what it meant.

  And Janine turned to William to see if he was hanging in there.

  But William Sandberg was no longer in the room.

  32

  They found him at his desk.

  They’d been through the entire castle, including the chapel and out on the terrace, and they had radioed Evelyn Keyes and got her to search the lists to see where his key card had passed and where he’d gone.

  It wouldn’t be the first time he’d tried.

  The drop from the terrace was at least a hundred metres straight down on to the rocks. And then there were ledges and balconies, and windows in the towers and in front of the chapel. If someone didn’t want to go on living, the place was brimming with opportunity.

  When Keyes returned with information about his location, everyone’s immediate thought was the windows. Janine had sprinted up the staircases, long strides, her feet against the stone floor like so many times before. This time afraid not for her life, but someone else’s.

  She arrived shortly before Connors.

  They threw themselves against the door to his workroom, expecting it to be blocked on the inside, but it swung open and they rushed in and there was nothing there to be late for.

  William was standing in the middle of the room. Empty gaze, a notepad resting against his palm and forearm, his eyes going back and forth over the wall. A pen in his other hand, ready to take down his thoughts if only they hadn’t been so impalpable and frustrated and full of shock.

  He didn’t even hear them enter.

  It was as if he was looking at the codes through a funnel, as if every new thought in his head made him forget two others, and as if the harder he struggled to understand, the more everything seeped through his fingers.

  She was dead.

  He’d seen her die.

  And he knew that she was merely one of thousands who’d already died, one of the countless millions more who would, but the funnel was there in front of him and no matter how he tried to see the big perspective, all he could see was her.

  But inside, he knew. This was only the beginning.

  And he wanted desperately to push the panic away, to find the solution – there had to be a key buried in all those numbers in front of him. It was his task to find that key before it was too late, and now he knew what too late really meant, and in his ears his heartbeats pounded like a deafening pulse, drowning out his thoughts and making him shut his eyes.

  The context. That was what she had talked about, Janine. The whole picture.

  And the fact remined: he didn’t have that.

  The sequences on the wall had been chosen by others, people who had deemed them central or fundamental or perhaps even just harmless enough for him to see.

  But the question was what filled the gaps. The parts of the source material he didn’t have, the numbers that didn’t hang on his walls, that came before and after, all the pieces of DNA that they had concluded weren’t part of the code. But how could they know the key wasn’t referring to a value in the gaps?

  What sequences was he missing? What prophecies were they keeping to themselves? Of the entire human genome, why had he only been given the parts that hung here?

  He didn’t get any further in his thinking before he felt someone touch his arm.

  It was Janine.

  ‘How’re you doing?’ she said.

  It was a stupid question, and they both knew it. But it was code for something else, that she cared about him and understood how he felt. And he appreciated that.

  A few paces behind stood Connors.

  ‘My deepest, deepest condolences,’ he said.

  ‘For what?’ said William. ‘For killing my wife? Or for bombing a hospital full of people?’

  And Connors could have answered. We only killed your wife, he could have said. The people in the hospital were dead anyway.

  But he didn’t.

  ‘What’s going on?’ asked William.

  ‘You know very well what’s going on,’ Connors said.

  ‘You’re right and I’ll rephrase. When are you planning on telling us everything?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Connors replied. ‘But you know what we know.’

  William turned his head away, not out of weakness but to gather energy, to summon up an even sharper, more commanding voice.

  Connors saw it coming, and cut him short: ‘This is the moment we were all afraid of. And yes, maybe we could have told you earlier, maybe we should have, but we chose…’

  He hesitated
. It had been Franquin’s choice, not his own, but he was equally guilty and there was no point in pretending otherwise.

  ‘For your sake, for your own —’

  No. He stopped, changed track: ‘There is knowledge we’re not meant to have. And the fewer of us who need to live with that knowledge —’

  The crash as the contents of William’s desk were shoved to the floor stopped him mid-sentence, just as effectively as William had hoped.

  ‘For fuck’s sake!’ he bellowed. ‘For fuck’s sake!’

  Paper, files, pens, everything rolled on to the worn stone floor, and William felt his senses return, as if his anger and adrenalin had found direction instead of purposelessly rushing around in his veins.

  ‘You made this happen! You knew what was coming, and you made it happen! You wanted to play God, you sent that fucking virus out there, you made that prediction come true yourself ! You.’

  The room was silent.

  ‘And now you tell me I don’t need to know?’ He took a deep breath. Fixed Connors with steady eyes. ‘You brought me here to help you stop this outbreak. Correct?’

  Connors wasn’t sure where he was headed. ‘We brought you here because we hoped it wouldn’t happen in the first place.’

  ‘Tell me then,’ William said, his face so close to Connors’ that he could feel the other man’s breath, ‘tell me why I don’t need to know.’

  Connors stood silent.

  ‘Tell me how I can crack your code. How can I find a cipher key that’s based on its own contents, that references itself and points back and forth and fuck knows what else it does, how am I supposed to do that if you don’t give me all the material to work with? How?’

  Still no answer.

  ‘If this is all I get, then how am I supposed to see the structure?’

  He walked up to the wall, placed his hand on one of the sheets, the one that Janine had translated into ‘plague’ and that hung almost as far to the right as he could go. And then he pointed towards the corner. The corner where the wall came to an end.

  ‘What. Happens. Next?’ Emphasis on every word.

  A second passed. Two.

  And William waited, ready for any answer.

  Except for one.

  When Connors opened his mouth it was as if the words refused to travel all the way, as if William could hear them but didn’t understand. The entire room was silent and he knew he should say something, but everything was empty and chillingly still, and if Connors had said what William thought he just had, nothing mattered anyway.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ William said. ‘I’m sorry, can you repeat that?’

  And Connors did. ‘Nothing,’ he said slowly. ‘Nothing happens next. You’ve been given all the sequences there are.’ He locked eyes with William. Waited for him to take it in.

  And then he did.

  One could tell from his posture, his gaze, his drooping shoulders. He reached out, as if he gasping for air but unable to get any, then he spoke to Connors with a voice that vibrated with fear and mistrust:

  ‘You’re lying.’

  ‘I wish I were,’ said Connors.

  Beside them stood Janine, the same fear in her eyes too, and she took a step forward as if decreasing the distance might make everything easier to grasp.

  This was it. This was what the Organisation had been so careful to hide. And now that she’d finally got to know she wished she hadn’t.

  ‘We’ve arrived at the plague,’ she said.

  That was all. She didn’t point at the wall, not at the sheet of paper on the far right of the wall, with one single prediction remaining to the right of it. She didn’t need to point, because everyone knew what she meant.

  William looked between them both. There was one question left. And he knew they would have the answer, but he still resisted asking it, resisted because he was too afraid of what the answer would be.

  ‘What comes after?’ he asked.

  And Janine glanced at Connors. Pleading with him to provide a better answer. Hoping she was wrong.

  But Connors only closed his eyes. Closed his eyes because his answer was the same.

  Janine lowered her gaze. ‘After the plague,’ she said, ‘there’s only one prophecy left.’

  ‘What does that say?’

  She couldn’t bring herself to meet his eyes. She looked up, but past him, through him, tried to find something else to focus on that would release her from having to say what she knew.

  But there could be no release. And when she opened her mouth, her voice was barely audible.

  ‘Fire,’ she said. ‘A huge and violent fire that ends it all.’

  None of them had said anything more. Minutes of silence had passed, and then Connors had turned and left the room without a word. He couldn’t help them deal with what they’d learned – how could he, when he couldn’t deal with it himself?

  Janine moved closer to William. Didn’t say anything, and yet he nodded back.

  And he held her, close, for a long, long time.

  Held her the way he wished he’d held his daughter.

  It hadn’t been a week since he’d wanted his life to end.

  Now it looked as though everyone’s would.

  PART 3

  Scenario Zero

  You can never, ever be ready.

  How could you be?

  When you can never, ever know?

  Nobody knows where we’re going. Not even time.

  Not even it knows, suddenly the time is now and something just happens, and you can’t do anything but to stand there and try to grasp without understanding. Why me. Why now.

  Because how could you understand?

  There are no rules.

  You can’t tell what’s going to be; if a truck suddenly appears from the left, that’s just what happens, and then everything goes black and nobody could know in advance.

  Nobody could ever be ready.

  Now they’re telling that me I’m wrong.

  That time knows where it’s going.

  That there is a set path.

  But even if that’s true, it still changes nothing.

  Evening, Wednesday 26 November.

  They say the world is coming to an end.

  I’m still not ready.

  33

  The ceremony didn’t take place in the chapel, and it was over in four minutes.

  What should have been a coffin was a bag with a zip lock, where should have been flowers were stainless-steel shelves, and what should have been family and friends were Connors, William and a couple of men in uniform, men who probably had names and personalities, it just didn’t seem that way when you looked at them.

  And Janine.

  She stood right up by the window pane, so close she could feel the heat from the fire in spite of the thick glass. Her eyes fixed on the white bag that could well have contained anything at all but that most certainly didn’t.

  She was the only one in the room who cried.

  On the far side of the pane the flames glowed incredibly hot, a private little purgatory inside a hole in the next wall, the blaze casting its light across the small space, out through the glass and landing on the sombre faces that stood there, waiting for it to be over. And all the while, Franquin’s voice worked its way through what had to be said, not because he wanted to but because it was his job.

  When the words were over, the automatic lift started to rise, slanting the metallic chute at an angle, tilting the bag with Helena Watkins’ remains on to the conveyor, allowing it to roll like groceries at a supermarket towards the roaring, steel-blue fire at the other end. When the bag arrived at its final destination, it was engulfed in flames within seconds.

  Inside the rectangular opening, the fire danced in whirls of colour. A firework display in thousands of shades, changing as new layers of the bag’s chemistry vaporised in the heat and ignited.

  And then, the hatch closed behind her.

  Inside, the remains of what had been Helena Watkins tur
ned to ash.

  And when the chamber was swept out several hours later, both the body and the virus she carried had gone.

  The only question being where would it resurface next.

  ‘If we’re lucky,’ Connors began, and paused.

  That’s the way he chose to open the meeting.

  He stood at the front of the blue parliament, silently surveying the rows of uniforms behind the arched table, pads and pens and mineral water in front of everyone as if this was a regular conference at any hotel in the world.

  But it wasn’t.

  Less than an hour had passed since they’d paid their last respects to Watkins, less than a day since a passenger jet transformed a major city into a muddy, burning wasteland, and the memory of the hospital they had destroyed hung over them like a filter of sorrow obscuring the thoughts they so desperately needed to think now.

  Nobody believed him. Nobody believed they’d be lucky.

  And he knew it the second he said it, but he went on anyway, stayed with his choice of words and repeated himself. It was his job to be an optimist.

  ‘If we’re lucky,’ Connors said again, ‘we’ve just witnessed the end of the outbreak.’

  No comments. Only a silent scepticism cutting through the room, lingering like an invigilator in an exam hall.

  ‘The man who escaped from us was found in Berlin six days ago, and as far as we’ve been able to determine there’s nothing to suggest he met anyone, except for the owner of the car that gave him a ride. At least not after becoming contagious.’

  On the screens behind him the entire world hung as a gigantic map, spread out across the monitors like an electronic mosaic forming a single picture. And Connors moved his fingers across the computer on his desk, soft movements to make the map zoom in on Europe and illustrate his message.

  ‘As for the car owner, he caused a lot more trouble.’ He pointed at the map as he spoke. ‘Nicolai Richter died in the pile-up in Badhoevedorp, but that didn’t stop him from spreading the virus further. We know it appeared again at Slotervaart Hospital, carried there by the doctor who’d declared Richter dead. We also know that the pilot of Flight 601 was involved in the same accident, treated at the scene by the same doctor and then allowed to leave and go about his business.’